For most of the 1960s Harrison Ford was a carpenter in Los Angeles with a SAG card tucked in his toolbox. He had been signed, then dropped, by Columbia for refusing to change his name. He built bookshelves for Sergio Mendes and a sauna for Sally Kellerman. In 1973 George Lucas cast him in American Graffiti because the price was right. Four years la
Biography
For most of the 1960s Harrison Ford was a carpenter in Los Angeles with a SAG card tucked in his toolbox. He had been signed, then dropped, by Columbia for refusing to change his name. He built bookshelves for Sergio Mendes and a sauna for Sally Kellerman. In 1973 George Lucas cast him in American Graffiti because the price was right. Four years later Lucas cast him in Star Wars because nobody else could make "I know" sound like a full romantic novel.
Han Solo and Indiana Jones are, by most box office metrics, the two most profitable roles in cinema history. Ford played them both. He added Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, John Book in Witness, Jack Ryan in Patriot Games, and Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. Six of his films have crossed a billion dollars. The American film industry has not produced, before or since, a star with that hit rate.
What Ford brought to every part was skepticism. His heroes do not believe they are heroes. They are reluctant, tired, sometimes annoyed to be in the scene. He once told Lucas, reading Star Wars dialogue: "You can type this shit, George, but you sure as hell can't say it." He then said it anyway and made a billion dollars.
He is also a working aviator with more than five thousand flight hours, certified in fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, and a longtime conservationist. He has flown helicopter rescues for lost hikers in Wyoming. He has crashed three times and walked away from all three. He serves as a vice chair of Conservation International and has testified before Congress on environmental policy.
In 2023 he finally played Indiana Jones one last time at eighty. The film was imperfect. Ford was not. Critics who had written him off in the 2010s wrote him back in. The whip cracked. The fedora fit. Somewhere in the Wyoming hangar, a Cessna was warming up for the weekend.
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